Capacity is said to be 25 pounds, but I was told the Antares 1527 6" refractor is too heavy for a mini-tower. Is there a reasonably priced tracking and goto mount for such a scope, whether it be altaz or equatorial?

It appears that we may very well have a clear night!! YIPPEEEEEE!!!! I'm hoping and crossing my fingers!! (Please, please, PULLLLEEEEEZE let it be clear!!!))

Chris and SteveC:

Thank you.

Nick:

Yes, you CAN move it manually, HOWEVER, you will NOT maintain any alignment. Also, this thing is very quiet and does NOT sound like it will be dropping a pound of French Raost into a bag at any time. LOL

I'm a little south of you in MA and last night was a pretty great night down here! Especially after 1am or so. Got four and a half much needed hours of observing in myself!

Sooooooooo..... what's the deal? I've got a MiniTower sitting in my shopping cart on Ioptron's website and an itchy trigger finger! Did you get to give it a work out? I'll even make the coffee for ya this morning if it helps.

We pulled an all-nighter and of course we are now paying for it with very HD T-Storms!!

I and a number of our club members were at the club observatory site. Everyone was quite interested in the Mini. They were also interested in the SmartStar-PR that I also had with me. Both were well received.

The Mini was a breeze to set up. I had the Mini leveled, aligned and seeking targets with the MAK in about 10 minutes. The three leveling screws really make that task much easier than playing with tripod legs!

The two star alignment was easy and afterward, M-13 was within the FOV. As I kept marching through objects (M-27, M-31, M-110, etc.) and used the SYNC to OBJECT function, the targets fell well within the FOV. By the way, this was with a 150mm MAK and a 32mm TeleVue EP. The FOV was a bit smaller than what I normally experience with my 4" f/15 refractor. The tripod did not wiggle and was surprisingly steady. I was very pleased with the results.

The dew that befell us last night was horrible! Everything was SOAKED by 0400!! The mounts kept doing their thing and worked very well.

I hope that anyone in the New England area had a successful a night! It may be quite some time before we get clear skies again. (Groooooooooooooan!)

At OPT, the rep said the trick he used to do an alignment was to turn on the mount, point the OTA anywhere, let it get a GPS fix, then goto Polaris. The mount will probably slew way off, but when it stops and beeps, he loosens the clutches and manually moves the mount until Polaris is centered in the eyepiece, and then tightens the clutches.

I spent the day recovering from that all-nighter last night! It's kind of funny because my 23 year old son was with me all night and he caved in before me. We both retired around 0500. I was back up at 0730. He slept until noon!! LOL